I had lunch with Israel Gat yesterday. Lobster bisque in a sourdough bread bowl, to answer your first question. We were talking about the concept of a “software defined business” (and I was complaining about how HEB needs more of that, if only to get digital Buddy Bucks). The question came up, so will companies really do this “software defined business” stuff (that’s the phrase I like for “third platform," “digital enterprise,” horseman style jabber-jargon)?

Never mind journalism, it’s industry analysts who are being disrupted. I keep coming across a new crop of IT industry analysts who end up getting compared incorrectly to journalists. It’s little wonder as most people have little idea what an industry analyst does; it’s not like analysts, hidden behind their austere paywalls, help much there. People like Horace Dediu, Ben Thompson, and others are experimenting with ways to disrupt industry analysts.

Occasionally, my fellow analysts ask me for advice on being an analyst. Here’s an edited up version of one of my recent emails: Learn how to listen to yourself, focus You have to learn to trust your intuition about what you focus on, your own style and voice, and, most importantly for monetization, how you market yourselves. The last point is important for commercial success: in most cases, the (analyst) company you work for will do a poor job marketing you compared to how well you can market yourself.

One of the “tricks” you learn in programming - “soft skills,” apparently they used to call them - is that you should match the style and formatting of the code you’re editing. If you’re starting with your own code from scratch, no problem, go crazy. But if you’re like most developers in the world and maintaining an existing code base with incremental improvements, you’ll more often than not be editing and adding to existing code.

I’m just about the give a short presentation on developer relations and marketing at our HCTS conference. For those who didn’t make it, here’re the slides and the “script” I typed out. As you may recall, I wrote a large report on this topic published back in August. It’s been fun talking with people about over recent months. Lost presentation: Selling to Hoodie and the Sticker-Festooned - Building a Developer Relations Program to Win Over Developers as Paying Customers

As an analyst, you often gets asked and paid to provide press release quotes (see some of mine here, though the I haven’t been good at saving all of them). Yes, press releases are still widely done and used. As someone who write-up the tech world happenings, I actually find them handy. Knowing how a vendor talks about themselves is actually important for analyst work, and the good press releases are more like media kits that line up all the relevant facts and links to other sources…and there’s all the bad stuff too, that’s still floating around.

Paul Krill asked a few questions about the future of PaaS last month for an omnibus appdev article of his (it’s a nice round up!). Here’s the only slightly edited full reply I sent him: Q: Does 451 Group see 2013 as a banner year for PaaS? If so, why? PaaS has always had the issue of being “big next year.” The nature of PaaS has shifted around so many times that it’s little wonder it’s yet to achieve escape velocity.

GitHub Traffic Analytics service gives developers insight into interest in their projects Paul Krill asked for some quick input on GitHub’s newly released analytics. Here’s what I sent over for his story: As the blog post says, it does look like fun, though pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. GitHub has been a major driver of getting the development community to care more about social interactions and collaborations, here, tracking who’s looking at your code and where they’re coming from - standard web analytics stuff.